Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.
It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.
‘Honest broker’ fiction
The United States is the star of the show, of course. Its officials tell a story of Washington desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved.
Yes, you read that right. This documentary really does resurrect the Washington as “honest broker” fiction – a myth that was supposed to have been laid to rest a quarter of a century ago, after the Oslo accords collapsed.
The film-makers are so lost to the reality in Israel and Palestine that they imagine they can credibly keep Washington perched on a pedestal even after we have all spent the past 16 months watching, first, President Biden arm Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, killing many tens of thousands of Palestinians, and then President Trump formulate an illegal plan to ethnically cleanse the enclave of its surviving Palestinian population to develop it as a luxury “waterfront property”.
Enduring mystery
This documentary, like its BBC predecessors – most notably on Russia and Ukraine, and the implosion of Yugoslavia – excels at offering a detailed examination of tree bark without ever stepping back far enough to see the shape of the forest.
The words “apartheid”, “siege” and “colonialism” – the main lenses through which one can explain what has been happening to the Palestinian people for a century or more – do not figure at all.
There is a single allusion to the events of 1948, when a self-declared Jewish state was violently founded as a colonial project on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
Or as the documentary delicately puts it: “Millions of their people [the Palestinians] had been made refugees by decades of conflict.”
As ever, when the plight of the Palestinians is discussed, the passive voice is put to sterling use. Millions of Palestinians were accidentally ethnically cleansed, it seems. Who was responsible is a mystery.
Even when the term “occupation” appears, as it does on the odd occasion, it is presented as some vague, unexamined, security-related problem the US, Israel and the Fatah leadership are engaged in trying to fix.
Nothing learnt
Israel and the US, of course, learnt nothing. They have responded since with intensified, even more obscene levels of violence – so grave that the world’s highest court has put Israel on trial for genocide.
Obscured by The Road to 7th October is the reality that Israel has always viewed the Palestinians as “human animals”. It just needed the right moment to sell that script to western publics, so that genocide could be recast as self-defence.
The 7th October attack offered the cover story Israel needed. And the western media, most especially the BBC, played a vital part in amplifying that genocide-justifying narrative through its dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.
The historical and political context offered by the documentary does nothing to challenge a decades-old, bogus narrative on Israel and Palestine – one that has long helped conceal Israel’s turning of Gaza into a concentration camp, one that made something like the 7th October breakout almost inevitable, and one that legitimised months of genocide.
The Road to 7th October seeks to rehabilitate a narrative that should be entirely discredited by now.
In doing so, the BBC is assisting Israel in reviving a political climate in which the genocide in Gaza can resume, with Netanyahu re-instituting mass starvation as a weapon of war and spreading Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations to the West Bank.
We don’t need more official narratives about the most misrepresented “conflict” in history. We need journalistic courage and integrity. Don’t look to the BBC for either.